Simple Guidelines for effective search engine optimization

One key element of your web site strategy alongside usability, accessibility, web design and branding is search engine optimization. After all, a highly usable, accessible web site is only of benefit to your visitors if they can find it!

In order to provide the best choice of content to search engine users, the algorithms used to rank web pages for search terms are constantly being improved. However, there are still a number of guidelines that, if used, will improve your web ranking. All of these guidelines are free and ethical search engine optimization techniques.

In this article we discuss 5 simple guidelines that you should follow in optimising each of your web pages. Over coming weeks, we will be adding new guidelines to help build an invaluable resource to our visitors.

Don't over-submit your web site to search engines

Many companies offer to submit your web site to 100s or 1000s of search engines for a fee. Take a step back; how many search engines do you know about? 5? 10? Which ones do you use the most? Google? AltaVista? MSN? If you can only think of ten search engines, why submit to 1000s? If you use google or MSN most of the time, why submit to an obscure search engine that is unlikely to drive traffic to your site. In addition, using these services will not only result in little benefit to you, it may also result in your site being banned from legitimate search engines due to over-submittal. For example, you are requested to submit a website to the ODP once. Over-submittal will result in not being listed.

Make sure you make the most of your title and description tags!

There are a wealth of meta tags available to you. However, only a small number of meta tags will help in search engine optimization.

For search engines, the two most important meta tags are the title and description tags. It is also very important that each page in your web site has a different title and description. Don't forget that when a visitor uses a search engine looking for a web site, you have to capture their interest with your listing.

In most search engine listings, the information displayed consists of the page title and either the description or selected content from the page related to the search term used. Make your page title and description interesting and compelling and you are much more likely to receive visitors.

However, keep in mind that titles should be no more than 60 or 70 characters long and are used when visitors bookmark your pages.

Use heading tags to highlight keywords

Take a look at this page? What stands out? The headings, use of bullet lists, etc, etc. This well-formatted content aids the visitor and search engines encourage this by ranking this formatting accordingly. Of particular importance are the header tags, e.g. <h1>, <h2>, etc. Ensure that you use them appropriately and don't forget that you can use cascaded stylesheets to meet the style of your web site.

Encourage quality sites to link to your site

One of the most asked questions at web design and SEO (Search Engine optimization) forums is 'why isn't my site being listed after months of submission?' The most common reason is that the major search engines, including Google, will only list your site if other web sites link to it. Find a number of reputable and related sites that would like to exchange links and you'll soon start to be picked up by search engine spiders. Try to make sure that the sites have a high page ranking too!

And finally, you will receive a higher Google Page Ranking if you have keyword-rich link text that links to pages on your web site.